This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Comments of the week: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post [EDIT: Response from reviewer here]. And some more discussion of people being one-shotted by works of art: hottakergeneral claims that Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”. Fact check: although Stuck’s Wotan looks eerily like Hitler, GPT-5 thinks any theory of casual resemblance is speculative and that there are other explanations for Hitler’s style.
2: Philosopher Richard Chappell responds to my (mild) criticism of his position on the embryo selection objections post.
3: In 2021, I wrote a blog post on how the best-supported treatment for insomnia was a therapy called CBTi, how it should be easily deliverable by app, but how the only good CBT-i app was prescription-only and cost $900. I challenged people to create normal non-prescription CBTi apps at normal prices. Now after four years, somebody has taken me up on the first half of the problem - a company called SheepSleep, working with a Stanford insomnia expert, has a CBTi therapy app for $298 per month (treatment usually takes 1-2 months). You can see more at gnsheep.com. They are offering ACX readers a discount with the code “ACX” (for first 50 people), and the founder asks any interested clinicians, orgs, or investors to reach out to her at luomei@stanford.edu. I still think someone should invent the $5 version, and would like to hear from anyone working on this so I can try to help them.
Note that although CBTi is very well-studied and this app is based on recommended protocols that could be reasonably expected to work, its claims as a product have not been formally tested. (EDIT: negative testimonial here)
4: New subscriber-only post I forgot to mention last week: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism:
Like most Americans, I only know four things about Mussolini:
He was the dictator of fascist Italy.
He made the trains run on time.
According to a WWII-era song sung by some of my older relatives, he bit his penis and now it doesn’t work.
Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers.
Subscribers can read it here.
5: Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise:
A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.
(A) volunteer(s) to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 aerospace and astronomy grants (I don’t know how often the same person has both these areas of expertise, feel free to apply if you have only one or the other).
A volunteer to do a large amount of work as the main evaluator for our policy team, which has about ~20 grants on their shortlist. These range from progress studies PACs, to voter education platforms, to free speech advocacy orgs. An ideal candidate would know enough about the policy landscape to have good opinions on which of these things will work and be cost-effective.
Each grant would require a few minutes to a few hours of your time (your choice, depending on how obvious you think the decision is) over the next three weeks. I can explain more details over email if you’re interested. Please volunteer using this form, if we have too many volunteers then I may not contact everyone who applies, sorry.
6: The team behind Eliezer Yudkowsky's upcoming AI book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, asks me to let interested readers know a few related announcements:
The book is coming out September 16 and can be pre-ordered here.
There will be a Zoom Q&A with the authors, available to book pre-orderers only, on September 4.
AI safety org MIRI wants to provide resources to reading groups interested in discussing it, if you have such a group, let them know here.
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